Michael Tieman was born in Iowa, but his family moved every few years around the mid-western states. Thanks to the encouragement of his fourth grade school teacher, Michael picked up a charcoal pencil and started to draw. For the next eight years, he filled his evenings and weekends taking art classes to round out his art education, including watercolor and oil painting, sculpture, printmaking, pottery, and his first love drawing.

Michael attended the Columbus College of Art and Design and in 1972 received his BFA in advertising design.

Taking his degree, Michael and his Canadian wife went to Vancouver B.C., Canada and he started out on a successful thirty plus year career in advertising design.

1986, after completing Expo 86 as the Sr. Graphic Designer, Michael relocated to Portland, Oregon with his family.

In 1993, Michael opened MT Studios in Portland, an outlet for not only his advertising freelance work, but also his fine art. In 2001, thanks to the encouragement from his family, Michael put his advertising career on hold and is devoting his time and energies toward his latest paintings of Pacific Northwest landscapes, seascapes, and people.

"My work is a combination of all of the techniques I have employed over the last thirty plus years in graphic design and fine art. In painting, I am concentrating on the medium of acrylics on canvas, refining my "early impressionistic" style of thick bold strokes of colors, strong abstract design, movement and texture, impasto over washes, and accents in the primary colors. And in my sculpture, I am taking that same impressionistic style and molding it in the clay. I feel that artists are visual storytellers, we begin the first chapter and the viewer rewrites the story each time they get involved in the art."

Membership/Organizations

*Pacific Northwest Sculptors
*International Sculpture Center
*International Society Acrylic Painters
*Oregon Society of Artists
*Cannon Beach Gallery Group - President and Board Member since 2002